Predicting Potential Habitat of Aconitum carmichaeli Debeaux in China Based on Three Species Distribution Models

Aconitum carmichaelii Debeaux is a perennial herb and medicinal plant, which has the effects of warming Yang and dispelling cold, warming meridians and relieving pain, dispelling wind and dehumidification, supplementing fire and helping Yang. In recent years, affected by the destruction of shrubs and climate warming, the habitat of A. carmichaeli wild resources has been seriously damaged, indicating of great significance to the artificial protection and cultivation of A. carmichaeli to predict its potential suitable habitat using species distribution models (SDMs). In this paper, 14 environmental variables and 449 specimen distribution records were applied to three models, i.e. MaxEnt, GARP and Bioclim to simulate the distribution of A. carmichaeli. Our results showed that, the AUC average values of the three models were all above 0.85 and the Kappa average values were above 0.75, justifying their applications for predicting the potential areas of A. carmichaeli. Furthermore, simulation of MaxEnt showed that, the highly suitable habitats were concentrated in the middle east of Sichuan (17.07x104km2), western Hubei (7.34x104 km2), southern Shaanxi (7.2x104 km2), north central Guizhou (6.74x104 km2), eastern Chongqing (5.62x104 km2) and western Hunan (5.21x104 km2) and scattered in the middle of Zhejiang (3.07x104 km2), the southwest Anhui (1.87x104 km2) and western Henan (1.43x104 km2). Jackknife test and response curves determined that the key variables affecting the distribution of A. carmichaeli were annual precipitation (751.25-1580.72 mm), precipitation of warmest quarter (422.71-717.21 mm), min temperature of coldest month (-6.85-3.12 & DEG;C), temperature annual range (24.83-31.97 & DEG;C), elevation (145.87-2769.22 m) and human footprint (<4.01).